looseleaf and liquid fiction
by damn expensive eggs
Summary: Tweek muses about dreams and social operating systems. Craig just wants to sleep.


"Do you dream in color?" Tweek asks in the middle of the darkness. He and Craig lay in bed, next to each other, for the first time in a long time. Sporadic, ugly sleep schedules tend to cripple the time spent in bed together, and they forgot the feeling. It's new. It's almost too close. They're both on their backs, inches apart, assorted linens between them.

Craig's eyes are still shut. He mumbles, "Course I do. No one actually dreams in black and white."

Tweek's eyes are wide open, trying to make out images in the ceiling. "That's not true. I've dreamt in black and white. I've dreamt in Russian. I don't even speak Russian."

"Then how do you know it was Russian," Craig presses.

"Because, you know how, in your dreams, you just _know _things?" Tweek looks over to Craig, who is just a crinkled, vague, annoyed bunch of shapes.

"Yeah, well, you didn't actually dream in Russian then, did you. You dreamt in your idea of Russian. Which is probably not Russian at all."

"What if you only dream in your idea of color?" Tweek asks as if he's just made a groundbreaking discovery.

Craig shakes his head at the ceiling. "That doesn't make any sense."

"No, but, what if you see red, but in your dream logic, you know it's blue?" Tweek recalls to several dreams he's had where the colors weren't what they seemed. "Even if you can't see it. You just—you know it's not the color you're perceiving."

Craig opens his eyes. "What the fuck are you even talking about?"

"Don't act like I'm not making sense just because you don't want to be an active participant of this conversation. You know what I mean—seeing things as they are in your dreams, but knowing they're something completely different. Do you think that means something?"

Craig has very little input. He's too exhausted for this—he should have foreseen this when they both realized they were tired at the same time. "It means you dream normally, I guess."

"No, but—see, I don't usually want to believe that star-crossed bullshit means something—but my dreams always have something to say, you know, like they always tell the future or they're trying to warn me about something. I could dream about some shit that doesn't make sense, and then it'll make sense a _year _later, and then my dream's like, 'I _told _you! I told you, dog! I told you about the bills! You knew you were fucked but you didn't listen.' And I'm like, 'Thanks, dream, for warning me a year in advance.' It's always symbolic, right? I feel like I have to break my dreams down like it's for English class. It's fucking annoying."

Craig feels Tweek's sudden passion about the subject radiating from the other side of the bed. It's too much. "What does this have to do with me dreaming in color."

"Nothing, it doesn't boil down to you, you never remember your dreams!"

"You're the one who asked me if I dreamt in color."

"I was just wondering. I just wanted to talk about dreams. They're like the greatest thing, you know? They're like the closest thing we have to an alternate universe. Things don't make sense, but we brush them off. Couches are flying and polar bears are singing." He's dreamt about those two things, simultaneously. He never figured out what those could have symbolized—perhaps the couches represented too much comfort, and the polar bears were singing about the melting ice caps. In that millisecond of thought, Tweek decides to be more conscious about leaving the lights on when he leaves rooms. He continues, "It's no big deal. It's like, compared to reality, dreams are these psychedelic cavities of all of the day's leftover thoughts, because the brain can't rest—it just compiles your worries and ideas into a long, intricate film that you can't even remember when you wake up." Tweek's sentence doesn't end up where he initially wants it to end up. He keeps dropping words and doesn't pick them up. "Don't you wonder where all the forgotten dreams have gone? Do you lie awake wondering what they were?"

"No."

"Of course you don't. When you lie down, you just fall asleep. Like normal people do, like people who were rocked to sleep by their parents as a baby. They just let me cry. Not that that's some sort of resentful thing." Tweek's parents didn't do it on purpose. He probably would have ended up with those erratic sleeping problems, anyway. "Babies don't have anything to cry about, but they do. Except maybe pooping. What do babies even _dream_? Everything is so new, what could their squishy new-baby-smelling brains even do?"

Craig groans. Closes his eyes again. "I think there's quite a bit of research going into that."

"But like I said, our dreams are just these films—" He tries to get back on track with his train of thoughts, but it's going a little too fast for him to handle. "—like all the tiny, little worker bee versions of ourselves working in our brains, are just taking the leftover thoughts from the fridge. It smells like old Chinese food. They shovel it into a trash can, and that trash can is our dreams." He certainly hadn't planned that analogy. He figured it was his subconscious trying to tell him to throw out the old white rice in the fridge.

"That trash can is our dreams? Are you high?"

"I took a bit of Xanax, yeah, but I'm not done—"

"Great."

"—I like to think my body is run by little versions of me. All the red blood cells would have my face. And a secretary works at the front of my brain, making appointments with other versions of me who want to propose ideas to the brain department. But the brain employees have nothing but sleeping and eating scheduled, so all the productive ideas are waiting in the waiting room forever."

Craig sits up halfway, finding himself intrigued with this particular musing. "I like that," he says, looking right at Tweek. "I like to think that my social skills department has been downsized. There's just one solitary guy working there, and his computer's running Windows 98. It breaks down frequently, but sometimes—sometimes it works for just ten seconds."

"You're right. The operating system of your social skills is Windows 98. You're pretty awful."

Craig plops back down. "Thanks."

"Not that mine is any better," Tweek counters. "I'm like Windows XP or something. But that's just because I talk a lot. People who talk a lot are often mistaken for social situation saviors. I fill up awkward silences. With awkward noise."

"That's why I like taking you everywhere with me," Craig says. "You talk for both of us."

"That's good news for your Windows 98 guy." Tweek thinks about Windows 98 guy. It's a tiny, childish version of Craig, at a computer desk in the center of a white room. "He doesn't have to do anything there."

"He kind of just plays that pinball game most of the time." Craig has a similar idea to Tweek's. Especially the white room part. Except, in his vision, there is a small Jefferson Airplane poster on one of the walls. "Then when someone walks by, he has to minimize it to make it look like he's doing work. But it's too slow, so everyone knows he's really playing pinball."

"He also needs to upgrade his empathy application. It keeps popping up on his desktop but he keeps clicking 'remind me later' so it never gets upgraded."

Craig snorts. "Thanks for that, too."

Tweek's on a roll. "Same with his hugging application. Empathy and hugs don't run on 98."

"I'm not crazy about hugs, okay." He really isn't. Hugs to Craig are violins to elephants.

"That's because you don't get them when you need them, so you don't feel like anyone else deserves your embrace." Tweek kind of pulls that out of his ass, but quickly decides he's right.

"Where in the fuck did you get that from."

"I just know you."

"No. I just don't like squeezing people. Nothing is gained from a body squeeze."

Tweek has a lot of feelings about hugs, however. "It's a common form of intimacy. You bring your bodies together in a joint of emotion. You melt together. Your hearts are close." He hugs himself tightly, demonstrating.

"That's the fucking stupidest thing I've ever heard. Go to sleep."

Tweek doesn't say anything, and turns his back to Craig. Craig turns his back to Tweek. Thoughts still actively racing, Tweek utters, "Sweet dreams." Craig flips over again, says, "Nope," and embraces Tweek as tightly as Windows 98 will allow.


End file.
